Event: Workshop Series: Making a Place We Can All Call Home:
Placemaking as Homecoming - Our Collective Spirit at Work?
Facilitator: Ian Wight PhD FCIP.
Venue: Sanctuary, Augustine United Church, 41 George IV Bridge, Edinburgh, EH1 1EL.
Dates: Thursday 14 September 2017.
Time: Registration: 6pm-6.30pm. Evening Workshop: 6.30pm-8.30pm.
Dates: Thursday 28 September 2017.
Time: Registration: 6pm-6.30pm. Evening Workshop: 6.30pm-8.30pm.
Dates: Thursday 12 October 2017.
Time: Registration: 6pm-6.30pm. Evening Workshop: 6.30pm-8.30pm.
Dates: Thursday 26 October 2017.
Time: Registration: 6pm-6.30pm. Evening Workshop: 6.30pm-8.30pm.
Event Description: For those who sense a 'maker' of sorts within themselves, including their role in the making of the places that they happen to love and cherish, and an interest in becoming a better maker of such places with others.
Placemaking is a human art and practice from time immemorial. Primarily, it is people who make a place – the people in the place, the people of the place. But this can often be missed today, through being ‘lost in space’. Our relationship with place can easily be taken for granted, but it might well merit closer discernment to help us better negotiate these challenging times - together. In particular, how might we go about making a place we can all call home? What’s the story here, the underlying poetry, the divinity at work?
Program Overview: In four, weekly, two-hour, discernments we will explore what we might mean by place, especially vis-à-vis space, wondering about its sacred and secular attributes, and its combination of primalcy and potency. We will consider our ‘sense of place’, in terms of sensing place within us – an inter-meshing of ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ sense-making.
We will prospect what we might regard as the qualities of place, with particular interest in place as an integration of sorts - of physicality, functionality, conviviality and spirituality. And we will speculate on the essence of place as something we make collectively, as a form of ‘coming home’ together, and coming home to ourselves.
What metaphors, or story-lines, or poetry, might resonate as part of our common meaning-making? To what extent might placemaking be regarded as our collective spirit at work, a form of soul-work? The aim will be connect better touch with the placemaker in each and all of us – the people who make the places that matter, in pursuit of our Anam Cara (drawing on the work of John O’Donohue, especially To Bless the Space Between Us).
Ian Wight, a Canadian Scot, has been – in roughly equal measure, over the past four decades or so - an educator of professional planners, and a professional planning practitioner. He is now exploring his re-firement (a re-placing of retirement), kindling his abiding passions, which include an advocacy of planning as placemaking, as wellbeing by design. True to his Scottish ancestry, Ian loves a really good ‘blether’ that bridges the personal, the professional and the spiritual. In this offering he draws particularly on application of an integral perspective, grounded in a selection of John O’Donohue’s blessings.
Session Outline:
An exploration of the place of place in our world, and – in particular - its making, and its implications for us... for the All of Us, in four, two-hour, experiential workshop sessions, primed by some blessings from John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us – A Book of Blessings.
September 14: Place and Space: Sacred/Secular – Primal/Potent?
September 28: Sense of Place/Sensing Place – Within Us?
October 12: The Qualities of Place – Enacted Collectively - Between Us: Anam Cara?
October 26: Placemaking as Poiesis – A New Beginning - Beyond Endings?
Cost: £10/£8 (Concessions)/£3 (Students) for each workshop.
£35/£30 (Concessions)/£10 (Students) for the series of 4 workshops. For a Registration Form:
Contact: Neill Walker, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., 0131 331 4469.